Cherry-Pick Files
Suppose you work on feature branch, e.g. wip/topic/feature, forked off of a source branch, e.g. master. Now, you have made some changes you want to immediately make available in source branch without waiting for feature branch to be finished - everyone should benefit from these changes as soon as possible.
Note: We are using wip/topic/feature here on purpose to highlight that the use case for cherry-picking files usually occurs when working heavily on such a work-in-progress feature branch.
Note: For the workflow below we assume that all of these changes are in a single file. This simplifies the workflow visually. You could apply the workflow to multiple files, too.
Note: This is analogous to the git cherry-pick command, even though we don’t actually use it.
# checkout source branch
git checkout master
# get all changes to `file` and apply them
git diff-tree --patch master wip/topic/feature -- file | git apply
git stage file
git commit
Finally, you also want to rebase the feature branch on top of the new source branch to remove the changes from feature branch we now already have in source branch. Most likely, there will be merge conflicts because feature branch iteratively introduces the changes, while source branch (HEAD) already has everything. Thus, you should almost always pick HEAD from the conflicts to remove the changes from the feature branch, which is, after all, what we want to achieve with the rebase.
git rebase master wip/topic/feature